Make Unforgettable Ads Find out what the latest research can teach you about creating ads your prospects won't forget.

Companies spend billions of marketing dollars each year todesign memorable ad campaigns. But what does it really take to makeyour business's name or message stick in a prospect's mind?These methods will make your next campaign memorable:

• Engage prospects. The more time someone spends with yourad, the more likely he or she is to remember it. "Vividprocessing leads to better storage of memory," says ElizabethF. Loftus, University of California, Irvine, distinguishedprofessor of psychology, author of 21 books and an expert on memorymalleability. The best ads get the advertiser or brand into theminds of prospects as they consider different possibilities.

How can you get prospects to spend more time with your ads?According to Philip W. Sawyer, director of Starch Communications, aHarrison, New York, testing firm specializing in readershipstudies, the most memorable print ads have messages that grab thereader. Those ads include headlines that contain a benefit and astrong visual focal point, such as a close-up of a model lookingdirectly at you. One large photo works best in magazines, while innewspapers, you can use multiproduct visuals. A StarchCommunications study on behalf of the Newspaper Association ofAmerica showed that when three-quarters of ad space was devoted toillustrations, recognition rates improved by 50 percent.

• Add color and contrast. For magazine readers,high-contrast images also boost recognition. When StarchCommunications tested two identical ads for Stolichnaya vodka--onewith a white background and another with a black background--twiceas many people remembered seeing the version with the blackbackground, even though everything else in the ad was thesame.

Testing also shows that, on average, larger ads in print mediaare more memorable. However, a creative ad in a small space can bemore memorable than a so-so one that takes up a full page.

Some colors enhance memorability in print media-including skyblue, golden yellow and shades of blue-green. Red is a good spotcolor in newspapers, where Sawyer says color increases recognitionby 20 percent. But there's new information about four-color adsin magazines: A few years ago, color ads earned 24 percent higherrecognition scores than black-and-white ads. Now, full-pageblack-and-white campaigns are breaking through the clutter, andfour-color ads have lost their advantage.

• Communicate frequently. Repetition is important tomemorability. At the WashingtonUniversity School of Medicine in St. Louis, psychologist MarkE. Wheeler conducted a study of memory in which a word was pairedwith a picture or sound many times over several days to testsubjects' recognition rates. He says exposure to information indifferent contexts helps you remember it. So when you see a messagein different formats, such as a print ad, a billboard and a TVcommercial, he says, "You associate the different impressions,and that helps you retrieve the information when you needit."

• Use memorable benefits. Ads that grab and hold aprospect's attention are those that immediately communicate abenefit that answers the question, What's in it for me? Thebottom line, says Sawyer, is that features aren'tmemorable-benefits are. "If you have a headline that states abenefit, people will read it, remember it and clip it out of themagazine or newspaper and hold onto it. And that's the trumpcard for everything."